Bush Unveils Faith-Based Missile Defense
By Gregg Easterbrook
Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2001, at 10:00 a.m. PT
WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush announced an initiative to
develop a faith-based missile defense. "For too long, military planners
have been denied the use of the supernatural in attempting to protect
American citizens from attack," Bush declared today in a speech to the
National Association of Amateur Submarine Captains. "There is no reason
why we cannot maintain a healthy separation of church and state while
still calling on divine intervention for the Pentagon budget.
Faith-based missile defense will be constitutional and fully consistent
with the way the Founding Fathers expected this great nation to handle
ICBM threats," the president said.
The faith-based defense would be nondenominational and designed to
protect Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Wiccans, as well as Christians,
officials said. (For technical reasons, it is unclear whether
nonbelievers can be protected.) Pentagon sources say the system is
code-named Rapture.
Initial plans call for Rapture components to be hidden in the steeples
of churches, which are about the size and shape of rockets, and possibly
in Catholic cardinals' miters. "If we put a Rapture anti-missile missile
in every church steeple in America, even small towns will be defended,
and the spending will be distributed to all congressional districts," an
informed official said. The schedule for development and construction is
uncertain, depending on how quickly cost overruns can begin.
White House officials insisted the system would pose no threat to the
religions of other nations and said that leadership at the Vatican,
Constantinople, Mecca, Amritsar, and other key world-faith sites would
be fully briefed on the project. "However there is some concern about
what would happen if this technology fell into the hands of the
Lubavitchers," one senior aide said.
While operational details of the system are apparently still being
worked out, during an attack by an ICBM launched by a "rogue state" or
possibly by Marc Rich, computers for the faith-based system would
rapidly activate a "prayer circle" of persons who will register with a
database as being willing to pray for national survival. Automated cell
phone and instant-messenger messages would instruct the persons in the
prayer circle on the altitude, azimuth, velocity, and orbital trajectory
of the incoming threat; they would then employ prayer to guide the
Rapture defensive missiles to the intercept point. "It's a pretty cool
concept technologically, although there is a danger of fire when each
missile blasts out of its housing in the steeple," one official said.
Critics said the system could be fooled if incoming warheads were
surrounded by a cloud of Torahs, Korans, Upanishads, and Gospels as
decoys. In secret tests conducted last month on a remote Pacific Ocean
island, a prayer-circle guidance team proved unable to distinguish
between a dummy nuclear warhead and a specially reinforced hymnal when
both were re-entering the atmosphere at speeds in excess of 8,000 miles
per hour.
President Bush also authorized the creation of an Office of Faith-Based
Research and Development at the Pentagon and named evangelist James
Dobson to head the project. (Lockheed Martin will provide management
services.) Dobson told reporters that he envisioned moving the Defense
Department beyond tanks, fighters, and aircraft carriers into an entire
new generation of faith-based munitions. "Lightning and swords will be
the weapons of Armageddon, so America must begin to stockpile the most
lethal, technologically advanced blades and energy-bolt projectors that
our science can design," Dobson said. "Saddam Hussein isn't working on
plutonium, he is trying to develop seven-headed dragons and gigantic
armored locusts. We're going to have a little surprise ready when he
tries to use them."
Dobson displayed a prototype faith-based infantry weapon, a gilded staff
that, he said, could hurl a powerful lightning bolt, scorching into
powder whatever it was pointed at. He urged onlookers to try the weapon
at a hastily arranged demonstration range. But when several reporters
attempted to fire the staff, nothing happened. "That's because you're
all journalists," Dobson said. "It only works for believers."
Separately, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that George W. Bush
favored changing the slogan on U.S. coinage and tender from "In God We
Trust" to "God Help Us." This phrasing "better reflects the president's
feelings about the coming four years," Fleischer said.